The unsubscribe links that bother me are the ones that say it could take several weeks to remove you from the list. When do you actually know whether or not it has worked and whether or not it's time to unsubscribe again? I don't trust them.

Thanks. It's one I debated bringing over to my profeessional career once I started working, but in the end decided to hell with it and it's pretty much interchangeable for my real name at this point :).

What if we could subscribe to an email provider that charges any sender, say, 1/10 of a penny to send a message to us? That shouldn't cost most individuals even 5 cent a day, and, it would make large-scale spamming prohibitively expensive.

I'm sure most of them work but I tend to wear that special kind of aluminum foil hat that says 'clicking on that link will verify to these nutjobs that I'm here.' I'm unintentionally proving what psychology has been saying for a century: nutjobs create nutjobs.

What this all comes down to is that there's no substitute for good content. But making good content is hard -- probably well nigh impossible in a culture that thinks sending spam beginning with "hello" is a good idea.

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